POTS & PLANTS

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West End cherry blossom time. (Photo courtesy of Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival)

A ROOM WITH A VIEW

 By Peter W. Gribble
(click images to enlarge)

How can you talk about gardening at a time like this?

In these strange and perilous times, we wonder if we have enough eggs, milk … salt. Wonder if we should’ve wiped down the handle of the garbage chute before we opened it. Wonder if that tickle in the throat is the first symptom, whether our partner will be safe or is it because we’ve been cleaning the apartment for the first time in ages.

We are asking ourselves questions we never asked before; seeing things that were always there but judged unworthy of notice. That fine crack in the bedroom ceiling, was it always that long? The hall’s parquet floor evoking grandmother’s patchwork quilt she made for you years ago when you were young – whatever happened to it? 

Some people are liberated by this alien pause in our lives. Free of the pre-April priorities, the daily habits that now feel inauthentic. The world has changed and we with it. What feels real? Perhaps it’s helping a nameless, housebound neighbour with their groceries; calling a friend not spoken to in a long while; renewing the tired soil in a potted plant. It’s oddly refreshing how this authenticity feels quietly, disruptively new.

Weirdly appropriately in the midst of this, is spring.

The Harrowsmith Almanac was right compared to the Old Farmer’s Almanac. Harrowsmith predicted a wet and cool early spring (pg 137) while Old Farmer’s said it was to be above normal temperatures and precipitation (pg 97.) Unwilling to get too specific, neither predicted mid-March’s more than a week of dry sunny weather. Either way, wet or dry, the cool spring slowed the cherry trees.

In the first week of February, the Prunus subhirtella ‘Witcomb’, an intense pink flowering cherry was blooming outside The Kensington apartment building at Nicola and Beach. By the first week of March, Prunus ‘Accolade’ was blooming with frothy abandon at the corner of Thurlow and Beach. The stretch of Accolade trees running from Comox through the Chilco Street mini-park to Nelson will be done by now. A gorgeous solitary blooming mid-March to mid-April is Prunus Yae-beni-shidare on Bute and Barclay Street. 

Avenues of flowering trees are breathtaking while single trees are striking when you come upon them in isolation but one of my favourite venues is the Burrard SkyTrain Station at Melville. A sunken tiered garden interplanted with Pieris and Sarcococca slows you on your travels but what stops you are the two encircling terraces of wondrous Akebono cherry trees arching overhead in a cathedral of blossoms. The swelling flower buds are red but pale to a light pink as they open then fade to milk-white. Petal-fall is something magical out of a Japanese art film.

 This year, as the city was shutting down, I made one last trip to the Burrard SkyTrain stop for a final Hanami or ‘cherry viewing.’ The buds were red and swelling with two or three blossoms beginning to open but that was it. My visit was poignant, knowing I was going to miss its full spectacle this year.

 It is an autumnal spring we are living through.

With self-isolation and quarantining, events of the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival were cancelled. Many remain online such as the Haiku Invitational, the Tree Talks and Walks and Bike the Blossoms. Check their website: www.vcbf.ca.

If your situation is constrained the ‘Hanami’ or ‘cherry viewing’ is possible if your windows or balcony permits. Along both sides of Davie Street from Jervis Street down to Hornby just past Burrard are the Rancho cherries (Prunus sargentii ‘Rancho’), a tree of narrow upright growth and warm pink flowers with a hint of apricot. They usually bloom mid-April.

The later blooming Prunus ‘Shiro-fugen’ (April to May) have pink buds that open in full petal blossoms of pink and white, which turn pure white before regaining some pink again before falling. Two trees are west of the Aquatic Centre at Beach and Thurlow.

 A helpful guide to these and more is Ornamental Cherries in Vancouver by Douglas Justice of the UBC Botanical Gardens and the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival (2011.) It’s a pleasure to read even if you can’t get out.

The Cherry Blossom Festival is cancelled, stores shut, hotels, restaurants and bars are dark. The streets are eerily quiet but the cherry trees bloom regardless of what humanity sets its heart on. Trees put on their glory then throw it off again as petals carpet empty sidewalks and shroud parked cars. Life carries on.

 Life on earth, in one way or another, shares, adapts and changes to the arrival and passing of the seasons. So, too, do we share the arrival and passing of calamity. Despite new rules of social distancing, the pandemic unites and empowers us when, as a community, we gather our pots and pans for the nightly 7 p.m. balcony concert cheering our exuberant thanks to our valiant and courageous first responders and health care workers. As the hospital shift changes, our deep-felt gratitude is neither distant nor isolated but loud and clear. When we unite as a neighbourhood we unite globally.

Yes. We look beyond our boundaries and see the stars but not every vantage point has an ideal view. When we take to our balconies or open our windows at 7 p.m. something blooms in our hearts when there are no horizons.